Privacy Analytics raises $3.5M for health data anonymization

The privacy of health data has slowly crawled into the crosshairs of both investors and startups as health systems go digital.

Several new companies, like Medable, offering to help health providers make their data private have appeared on the scene. One of them is Canada-based Privacy Analytics, which today said has raised a $3.5M in new funding in a round led by Vanedge Capital. Vanedge joins BDC IT Venture Fund and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) as the main investors in the company.

Privacy Analystics’ software makes health data safe for analysis and research based on the situational and intended use of the data, also making it HIPAA-compliant. The software then applies risk thresholds to the anonymization of personal data residing in standard database tables, text and other document formats.

So customers get quality individual-level data for analysis while simultaneously protecting personal information, the company says. The anonymized data can work for secondary purposes, such as research, quality and safety improvement, public health, payment, certification or accreditation, software testing, and other business applications with an automated, enterprise-standard process that saves substantial time and money.

“We believe Privacy Analytics is well situated to become the de facto standard for automated risk-based anonymization in healthcare and other industries,” says V. Paul Lee, the managing partner for Vanedge.

“As organizations gather more data, they’ll need enterprise solutions to manage and monetize sharing of information to avoid the costly breaches of personal information that have dominated the media as of late.”

The company’s customers represent half of the Fortune 50 healthcare companies, as well as some large academic and research organizations, such as The Center for Clinical Excellence at Mount Sinai in New York City.